An evo-devo geek's scientific meanderings

larvae

So I felt like I couldn’t put off the sixteen hundred articles twiddling their thumbs and tapping their feet in my RSS reader any longer. This is the first part of the crop that has accumulated since late December (yikes!). Legless axolotls, homing starfish, secretly related proteins, and more!

It’s probably not exactly obvious from my posting record, but a large part of my PhD work is about regeneration. It’s something we humans are pretty shit at, but many other vertebrates aren’t. Axolotls, these adorably dumb-faced salamanders, can easily regrow their legs. However, lab axolotls are kind of permanent babies. Although they can grow up in the sense that they are able to breed, they normally keep larval characteristics like gills throughout their lives. It’s reasonable to suspect that this influences their regenerative ability – after all, tadpoles lose their ability to regrow limbs the moment they turn into frogs.

It’s possible to make axolotls metamorphose, too, if you treat them with thyroxine (the same hormone that induces metamorphosis in “normal” amphibians). And when they turn into proper adult salamanders, they suddenly become much poorer regenerators. They can still replace a limb – kind of. But they take twice as long as non-metamorphosed axolotls of the same age and size, and they invariably wind up with small, malformed limbs, often missing bones. After amputation, new skin is slower to grow over their wounds, and the cells that gather under the new skin are sluggish to divide. Something about metamorphosis – that isn’t simply age – dramatically changes how they respond to amputation.

“Regeneration” can cover a lot of different processes. For example, depending on the creature and the organ you’ve damaged, regenerated body parts can come from totally different kinds of cells. In planarian flatworms, a single kind of stem cell can replace anything else in the body. In the eyes of newts, mature cells of the iris transform into lens cells to replace a missing lens. In our muscles, there are special cells called satellite cells that are held in reserve specifically to make new muscle cells when needed.

This recent study of a little crustacean called Parhyale hawaiensis suggests that muscle regeneration in the fingernail-sized arthropod works in much the same way. Konstantinidis and Averof shot early embryos of Parhyale with DNA encoding a fluorescent marker, which randomly integrated into the genomes of some of the cells it hit. In a few “lucky” individuals, the marker ended up labelling just one cell lineage, and the pair used these animals to figure out which cells made which tissues in a regenerated limb.

It turned out that cells in Parhyale are limited in their potential. Descendants of the ectodermal lineage could make skin and nerves but not muscle, and the mesodermal lineage built muscle but not skin or nerves. Moreover, labelled cells only contributed to regeneration near their original location – animals with their left sides labelled never regrew glowing limbs on the right side. This is starting to sound a lot like vertebrates, but it’s still a very general observation. However, the similarities don’t end there.

Like vertebrate muscles, the muscles of the little crustaceans contain satellite-like cells derived from the mesodermal lineage that sit beside mature muscle cells and express the Pax3/7 gene. When the researchers transplanted some of these cells from animals with the glowy label into leg stumps of non-glowy animals, there were glowing muscle cells in some of the regenerated limbs. So like satellite cells, these cells can turn into muscle during regeneration. There’s little question that muscle cells have a common origin in vertebrates and arthropods like Parhyale, but it’s really cool to see that their mechanisms of regeneration also might.

Proteins can be difficult. I mean, sometimes they do their darnedest to hide their family ties. A protein is a chain of amino acids (on average about 300 of them) often folded into a complex shape. Closely related proteins have obviously similar amino acid sequences. However, more distant relatives can be harder to identify. There are about 20 different kinds of amino acids in proteins, so the number of possible sequences is unimaginably vast. The same function can be carried out by very different sequences, and therefore enough evolution can completely erase sequence similarity.

Protein structures are generally thought to be more conserved than sequences. Like function, structure allows for a huge amount of sequence variation without significantly changing. However, theoretically, it’s possible that two unrelated proteins have similar structures because of their similar functions, not because of common ancestry. Apparently, this has been argued for the two types of rhodopsins – proteins that harvest light in systems as different as a the “solar generator” of a salt-loving microbe and the photoreceptors of our own eyes.

If Type I and Type II rhodopsins are similar despite being unrelated, one would assume that this is because they need to be that way to capture light. There are, after all, astronomical numbers of possible protein structures, and the chances of two protein families accidentally stumbling onto the same one without selection steering are slim to say the least. But, in fact, you can rearrange the structure of a rhodopsin in all kinds of cunning ways without destroying its function. This rather weakens the case for convergent evolution, and suggests that similarity of structure does indicate common ancestry here.

(Blue starfish, the beast featured in the paper, in its natural habitat. Richard Ling, Wiki Commons.)

Starfish aren’t widely known as visual creatures, but they do have eyes at the tips of their arms. The eyes are a bit… basic – no lenses, just a hundred or two little units filled with photoreceptors. Garm and Nilsson set out to find out how the starfish used their eyes. They measured or calculated the eyes’ visual fields (five arm-eyes together can see pretty much everywhere around the animal), resolution (very coarse), reaction speed (slow), and their sensitivity to various wavelengths (they are colour-blind, most sensitive to ocean blue).

Then they took some poor starfish and dumped them a little way off the coral reefs they like staying on. The creatures could walk home from short distances (about 2 m or less), but if you take them too far away, they just wander around in random directions. Likewise if you take off their eyes (don’t worry, they regenerate) or do the experiment in the dark. In conclusion: starfish eyes aren’t exactly top-end cameras, but they are definitely useful to the animals. And what would a slow, brainless mopper-up of coral reef rubbish do with eagle eyes anyway?

(The paper states the walking speed of these starfish as about 4-5 cm per minute. I have a feeling this wasn’t the most exciting fieldwork these guys have done…)

OK, Shikuma et al. (2014) one isn’t so much for its own news value, but I hadn’t known that my favourite worms need bacteria to settle until I saw this paper, so I think it deserves a mention. (Besides, it has beautiful pictures of baby Hydroides in it, which I couldn’t resist posting below. They are So. Cute. Yes, I’m weird.)

Tubeworms of the serpulid family have swimming larvae which are in many ways like the acorn worm larvae mentioned in my previous post (except cuter). They are tiny, look nothing like an adult worm, have bands of cilia for swimming and feeding, and live in the plankton until they’re ready to metamorphose. When they find a place they like, they settle and turn into adult worms. And apparently, this particular species (Hydroides elegans) not only needs a specific bacterium to like a place, it needs specific proteins produced by that bacterium.

The proteins in question are the components of a nasty device bacteria probably stole from viruses and then used to poke holes in one another. But to Hydroides larvae, they appear to be necessary for metamorphosis. Put healthy bacteria together with worm babies in a dish, and you’ll get happily settled little worms. Do the same with bacteria with damage to the relevant genes, and nothing happens. Use an extract containing the proteins but not the bacteria, and you still get metamorphosing worms. Use too much, though, and they start dying. Everything in moderation…

(Maybe my dismal failure at raising happy young worms years ago could have been remedied with the right bacteria?)

6. Relative of animals does strange multicellularity with familiar genetics

Although this idea probably hasn’t reached popular perception, animals are surrounded by other multicellular lineages in the tree of life. Sure, most of them are only part-time multicellular, but that’s beside the point. What’s clear is that multicellularity, at least in its simpler forms, is rampant in our extended family. Slime moulds do it, fungi do it, our closest relatives choanoflagellates do it, and our next closest relatives, filastereans and ichthyosporeans also do it.

These latter two groups are really poorly known (the fact that only a taxonomist could like the latter’s name probably doesn’t help), but the situation is getting better with the attention they are receiving as relatives of animals. There are now genome sequences out, and some people are looking at the life cycles of the little creatures to search for clues to our own origins.

Iñaki Ruiz-Trillo recently published a paper describing an ichthyosporean that can form a weird kind of colony with many nuclei in the same membrane starting from a single cell (Suga and Ruiz-Trillo, 2013). Now his team describe a different kind of multicellularity in a filasterean, Capsaspora owczarzaki. Rather than developing from a single cell, this guy does something more akin to the slime mould way: take a load of individual cells and bring them together. (Below: a clump of Capsaspora cells from Sebé-Pedros et al. [2013]. On the right is a regular photograph of the colony. The two-coloured fluorescence on the left indicates that the colony formed by different cells coming together rather than a single cell dividing.)

But, interestingly, some of the genetics involved is similar to what animals use, despite the different ways in which the two groups achieve multicellularity. For example, we’ve known since all those genomes came out that the proteins animals use to glue cells together and make them talk to each other are often older than animals. Well, Ruiz-Trillo’s filasterean appears to ramp up the production of some of these when it goes multicellular. It also uses a gene regulation strategy that animals are really big on: it edits the RNA transcribed from many genes in different ways depending on cell type/life stage before it’s translated into protein.

A lot of the details are going to need further investigation, since this was a global RNA-sequencing study with a bird’s-eye view of what genes are doing. It’s still a nice reminder that, like most other innovations in evolutionary history, the multicellularity of animals didn’t spring fully formed out of nowhere.

(I think we’ve reached the point where it’s weird to say happy new year. I could swear xkcd had a pertinent chart of funny, but I couldn’t find it.)

Once upon a time, I briefly mentioned the problematic relationships of hemichordates. Since a short paper bearing on the subject came out relatively recently (i.e. in December, yes, I’m far behind the times ;)), I thought I’d revisit it.

To begin, let’s orient ourselves on my trusty old animal phylogeny.

Hemichordates are a phylum of deuterostomes, and their closest relatives appear to be echinoderms like starfish. The inside of Deuterostomia looks something like this:

Hemichordates come in two flavours: the butt-ugly (but nevertheless intriguing) acorn worm, which even the artistic eye of 19th century zoologists couldn’t make appealing (a selection of them from Johann Wilhelm Spengel’s work below):

… and the slightly nicer-looking pterobranch. Well. They’re kind of fluffy. That counts as “nicer,” right? (A couple of Cephalodiscus from the Halanych lab below):

Acorn worms and pterobranchs have different bodies adapted to very different lifestyles. Pterobranchs are stalked, tentacled filter-feeders that often clone themselves into colonies that live together in a branching tube system. Acorn worms are solitary burrowers without tentacles, tubes or shells. Hemichordates possess features in common with vertebrates, such as gill slits, and they seem a lot less freakish than their sister phylum Echinodermata. So hemichordates are kind of the natural go-to group to look for properties of the deuterostome common ancestor.

The only problem is, to do that, you need a solid understanding of hemichordate phylogeny itself. Because there are two very different kinds of hemichordates, you have to first figure out which of those best represents their common ancestor: the sit-at-home plankton sifter or the roaming mud-eating worm. (Maybe neither. Wouldn’t that be funny.) And, as it happens, there’s some disagreement about that.

One view, espoused by the mighty zoological tome of Brusca and Brusca (2002) among others, puts acorn worms and pterobranchs as separate sister groups, and considers pterobranchs the more conservative of the two. The Bruscas write, on page 869, that “the enteropneusts [= acorn worms] have lost [their tentacles], no doubt in connection with their development of an infaunal lifestyle.” In this view, the deuterostome ancestor was a sessile filter feeder, and the long worm-like body and general moving-aboutiness of other deuterostomes is a new feature.

The other hypothesis, backed by DNA sequence data (Cannon et al., 2009)* and more recently the discovery of a tube-dwelling acorn worm from the Cambrian (Caron et al., 2013), is that pterobranchs are a weird subgroup of acorn worms and therefore unlikely to say much about our own distant ancestors.

One thing that AFAIK both camps agree on is that the ancestral acorn worm had a larva that looked nothing like an acorn worm. That’s something pretty common for marine invertebrates. Creatures as different as sea urchins and ragworms explore the seas by way of tiny, planktonic larvae that later metamorphose into a completely different animal**. (Tornaria larva of an unidentified hemichordate below by Alvaro E Migotto from the Cifonauta image database.)

However, the specific family of acorn worms that pterobranchs supposedly come from does not have such a larval stage. They develop more or less directly from fertilised eggs into mini-acorn worms.

Pterobranchs are poorly studied, so not much is known about their babies. Are they like the conventional acorn worm larva, with its distinctive body plan and curly rows of cilia? Or are they more straightforward precursors of the adult, like their presumed closest cousins? Stach (2013) describes a larva of the pterobranch Cephalodiscus gracilis that looks more like the latter. He found the minuscule creature crawling around in a colony of adult Cephalodiscus, and used thin sections and transmission electron microscopy to make a 3D reconstruction of it.

(His account of finding the baby makes me wonder how the hell he knew it did belong to Cephalodiscus. If my experience with tube-dwelling marine invertebrates is anything to go by, being found in a certain animal’s home is no guarantee that you’re related to said animal. I suppose, incomplete though they may be, older descriptions of pterobranch babies were good enough to identify the little guy?)

The image that emerges is of a rather featureless little sausage. According to Stach, it has a through gut, one full-fledged and one partially formed gill opening (asymmetry like that is not unheard of in deuterostome embryos/larvae), as well as a body cavity and a bunch of muscle cells. What it doesn’t have is any trace of the bands of cilia that “typical” acorn worm larvae use to swim and feed, nor some other structures (e.g. nerve centres) that characterise such larvae.

Taken at face value, this would suggest (assuming this is a typical pterobranch larva) that the pterobranchs-are-acorn worms people are right. I have my reservations, and not just because a sample size of one makes me statistically nervous. Using this description as evidence for evolutionary relationships assumes that traditional larvae with ciliary bands are hard to lose. But that’s quite possibly not the case.

Echinoderm larvae, for example, have changed a lot even in the last few million years. The changes occurred many times independently, and often involved a return from a full-fledged larval stage to more direct development (Raff and Byrne, 2006). I don’t know whether acorn worms display a similar sort of flexibility. How many have even been studied in terms of development?

So: detailed internal structure of a pterobranch larva? Cool. As to the worms first hypothesis… “consistent with” would be a better description than “supports”, I think.

I once wrote about the complicated way in which ocean acidification is mostly really bad for marine creatures with calcium carbonate shells/skeletons. Well, today, while reading a book I thought had nothing to do with ocean acidification, I came across a report of one such creature for whom the change is apparently for the better. (I’d expected to find all kinds of interesting information in Embryos in Deep Time, but this was a surprise…)

Dupont et al. (2010) studied common sun stars (above; Bernard Picton, habitas.org.uk), following the larvae right up to metamorphosis under current CO2 and pH values of their home seas, and also under a near-future predicted scenario with higher CO2 concentration and lower sea pH. Surprisingly, the larvae in the “future” tanks survived just as well, grew better, and showed no obvious defects in development or calcification compared to the control group.

The authors speculate that this might be related to the reproductive strategy of these animals. While the larvae of many echinoderms have very little yolk in their eggs and have to feed the moment they look vaguely like an animal, sun star larvae are provided with a lot of yolk that can sustain them until they’re ready to metamorphose. So they don’t have to face the burdens of hunting for food; all their energy can go towards growing, which might make them more resilient to harmful environmental effects.

I’m not sure I buy such a simplistic explanation – first, other echinoderms with a similar developmental strategy suffer quite badly in similar conditions; and second, they only examined one species during the early stage of its life cycle. In fact, the authors point out these exact same caveats. (Plus the creatures not only resisted acidification, they thrived.)

Whatever the mechanism, though, Dupont et al.‘s data show that there is at least one animal for which ocean acidification may be a boon. Considering that this guy happens to be a top predator in its ecosystem, that could have major consequences for said ecosystem.

What you are looking at is the fluorescently stained muscles of a phoronid larva. (Phoronids are one of the zillion variations on “tentacled filter feeder sitting in a tube” nature has come up with. They are related to lamp shells.) I couldn’t care less about larval muscles – not even sure why I opened the paper – but that looks friggin’ awesome. And a bit psychedelic.